"At least in dying you don't have to deal with new wave for a second time." - The Hold Steady.

We love the Hold Steady's latest record. If anything, it is amazing how they can write so many great songs about being wasted and high and searching for and finding salvation. If we end up with nothing to do on a rainy day soon we will make a list of all the places where people pass out or come to on Separation Sunday. That's rock and roll, we guess.

Beleive it or not this post will bring Clicky Clicky up over 33,000 words. Oh well, anything to not have to watch One Tree Hill, particularly with Jimmy Eat World over-emoting through entire show. Some changes are afoot here, as it seems the Junkmedia blog may get off the ground shortly, even before the site redesign that is also in the pipeline. Once that blog goes live, we guess about 99% of our efforts will be expended there. We'll point everyone over there when it all happens.

Coolfer bemoans how indie rock has become narrow and dull and too predictable. They base their assertion at least in part on recent experiences seeing Built To Spill and Death Cab, observing that the bands no longer move them the way they did some five years ago. While we agree a tiny fraction with Coolfer, we think that much of their problem lies in trying to get the rush of an up-and-coming act from an act that is five years beyond the time when they really had fire in their guts (we'd argue that BTS took a right turn away from indie pop 10 years ago after There's Nothing Wrong With Love that left us feeling a bit sad, and that five years ago BTS wasn't actually doing anything of interest then, and certainly not now, but we digress).

Anyhoo, Coolfer says the next trend over the horizon is Rawk (didn’t "rock" "return" when there was all the hype pushing the White Stripes/The Hives/That Australian Band Where One of Those Doods Went Crazy Or Something Who Supposedly Sounded Like Nirvana?), and names a few likely suspects to lead the music industry's assault.

Follow-up: just to briefly revisit our Coldplay discussion, EMI's quarterly financials were released and sales were down, as expected. We're always interested in digital sales, since we spent a couple years hounding the major labels for info about their online strategies back in the day. According to Marketwatch, "[d]igital sales at EMI Music rose more than 300% to 35.6 million pounds for the financial year, with digital sales now representing 2.2% of total revenues."

Finally, The Monkey digs the new S-K, and has even turned us onto it. Splendid's Jen Kelly thinks it's their worst joint to date. Speaking of reviews, here are two we wrote recently: The Books. Colleen.

That is all.